Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, July 30, 2015:

A graph of the Shanghai Index showing the first bubble in 2006-2008

In the last 30 minutes of trading on Wednesday, the Shanghai Composite Index jumped more than three percent, while the smaller Shenzhen Composite (equivalent to the U.S. Nasdaq index) leaped more than four percent. That this was the result of actions taken by China’s unofficial “plunge protection team” was obvious to Jacky Zhang, an analyst at BOC International: “Clearly it is government intervention again.”

China’s plunge protection team (PPT), equivalent to the U.S. stock market’s “Working Group on Financial Markets” set up under President Reagan following Black Monday in October 1987, has moved heaven and earth to keep its stock markets from collapsing. The team, made up of China’s Securities Finance Corporation and the China Securities Regulatory Commission, along with top officials from the country’s 21 largest brokerages and the Chinese central bank, has implemented an entire panoply of measures to stem the tide, including:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, July 29, 2015:

According to the Census Bureau, home ownership in the United States has now dropped to the lowest level since 1967, and estimates are that the decline will continue to the lowest level ever recorded. The rate for the second quarter of 2015 was 63.4 percent, the lowest rate since Lyndon Johnson was president. The rate stands a good chance of reaching the all-time low, 63 percent, set in 1965 when the U.S. government began keeping track of such a statistic.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. In 1995 after the rate dipped to a breath-taking, eye-popping 64.7 percent from the previous 50-year average of 65.3 percent, according to the Census Bureau, the Clinton administration issued a call to arms! The government must do something!

When then-President Bill Clinton announced his “National Homeownership Strategy” in May 1995, he said,

The latest report from the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) merely confirms what most sentient souls living in the US already know: more Americans are becoming aware not only of their Second Amendment rights but of the increasing threat posed against them by the current administration. More people are learning about that “palladium” of their liberties:

The gun manufacturing industry produced about 4.5 million firearms in 2008, the year before Obama was elected president, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (still known as ATF). In 2013 the industry produced 10.8 million, an increase of 140 percent in just five years.

This, according to Erich Pratt, spokesman for the pro-gun group Gun Owners of America, gives President Obama quite a distinction:

At the end of the soccer game between Cuba and Guatemala at the Pan Am Games in Toronto last week, star midfielder Ariel Martínez began weeping in the middle of the field. Many felt that he should have been celebrating, since Cuba bested Guatemala in the contest 1-0.

But Martínez was crying because he had made his decision to defect to the United States, and would be leaving everything he had known behind: family, friends, teammates, and ties to his country. But the opportunity to pursue his dream overcame them all:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, July 28, 2015:

Being mentored by one of the masters in deflection, neutralization and obfuscation certainly hasn’t hurt Hillary Clinton in her run for the White House. Time after time, something that should have penetrated the steel hull of her battleship and sunk it into the pages of history has just bounced off it instead, leaving believers awestruck and opponents gnashing their teeth.

She’ll need every skill learned at the feet of her husband, Bill Clinton, who navigated his way through a political career pockmarked with potential career-ending incidents. She polished them during a Clinton-friendly interview at CNN on July 7, with partisan Brianna Keilar:

Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton, reacting to the release of reports by the inspectors general of both the State Department (where she used to work) and Office of National Intelligence that some of her personal e-mails contained national secrets, predictably responded by deflecting the real issues. Rather than directly confronting the charges, she criticized the New York Times for bringing them to light. That article, she said, “contained a lot of inaccuracies,” probably because of the heat:

Every year the language of the trustees of the Social Security system becomes more strident, and every year the managers of the program kick the can further down the road. In its report issued on Wednesday, the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees stated that “Social Security’s Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Fund now faces an urgent threat of reserve depletion, requiring prompt corrective action by lawmakers if sudden reductions or interruptions in benefit payments are to be avoided.” The report noted:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, July 24, 2015:

Buried in the annual exclamations of urgency by the trustees of the Social Security system issued on Wednesday was this warning: action by Congress will “give the public adequate time to prepare.” In the short run, some 11 million on Social Security Disability will learn that their benefit checks will drop by $200 a month starting next fall, so they need to get used to that. In the long run everyone receiving anything from the celebrated Ponzi scheme will see their checks go to zero:

After retrieving and analyzing the Chattanooga shooter Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez’ diary, the FBI claimed that it still cannot find any direct connection to ISIS or that he “was inspired by the Islamic State” or the Koran. Instead, claims by the FBI were made that the shooter suffered from depression, entertained thoughts of suicide, was deeply in debt, and engaged in rampant and excessive use of drugs, marijuana, and alcohol. FBI agents also claimed that he had to use sleeping pills after the 12-hour night shifts where he worked.

But, after extensive analysis of his diary and interviews with the shooter’s parents, the FBI still couldn’t find a motive for his murder of military servicemen last Thursday. Even a “family spokesman” claimed that the shooter